Presently available commercial and military aircraft typically employ a suite of radios to perform specific communication, navigation, surveillance, and other aircraft control operations. A limitation associated with such design is that multiple radios must be utilized so that the desired operations may be performed. Software Defined Radios (SDRs) have the potential to decrease the number of radios needed on a given aircraft to perform the desired operations by changing the configuration of the radios during the mission or flight to meet the operational needs for the current phase of the mission (or flight).
A SDR allows multiple software modules implementing different standards to co-exist within one system. As such, the SDR is reconfigurable in which dynamic selection of various parameters is possible by selecting the desired software module. This feature is advantageous over a complete hardware based radio system in which parameters for each of the functional modules are often fixed.
Although the use of SDRs may decrease the overall number of radios necessary to perform aircraft operations, currently configured SDRs may not be able to meet the operational, regulatory, certification, or other mission requirements during failure/emergency conditions, like minimum power (e.g., battery-only operation) or with failures of the re-configuration control mechanism or common processing/power supply elements, and the like. Due to regulatory, certification, or other mission requirements, the benefit of re-programmable modules may be limited unless the system configuration (including re-configurations) may be proven to be robust for meeting the requirements during all phases of the mission including rare failure/emergency conditions.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system and method for SDR waveform/function management which is capable of meeting operational, regulatory, certification, and other requirements during all phases of a mission.